 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon and welcome to our 14th issues in national security lecture for this academic year. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as the host for today's event to kick off the session. I'd like to call on Rear Admiral Chatfield to offer her welcoming remarks. Admiral? Well, thank you, Professor Jackson. It's so great to be here again and I'm once again paging through the many faces and pictures that are on my screen because it's just so inspiring to me to see people voluntarily attend a lecture such as the one tonight because of your interest, because of your academic and scholarly curiosity, and because of your affinity and affiliation with our United States Naval War College. So this lecture series is so important to me and my husband, David, who is away and so he won't join me this evening, but having this opportunity to share our wonderful lecture series with a broader community to allow more people to understand what it is that we do here and to be exposed to the topics and the rich scholarship of our faculty members and then to also host our family discussion group after and we'll have Dean on this evening who will talk to us about MWR and what might be coming this summer as we see our vaccination program continue and possibly some more things open up for us. So we're excited about that. And so now I don't want to take up any time because we've got a fantastic lecture for you and over to you, Professor Jackson. Thank you very much, Admiral. I will now say what I've said 13 times before about why this series was established. We want the recording of each lecture to be a standalone event so please excuse the redundancy. This series was originally established as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. It has been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport, and participants from around the nation. We will be offering four additional lectures between now and May of 2021. An announcement detailing the dates, topics, and speakers of each lecture will be posted by our public affairs office. Now stand by for some new information. The college is pleased to offer certificates of participation to all viewers who have attended at least 60 percent of the offered lectures or 11 out of the 18. We will use the honor system and will upon request award certificates to everyone who completes 11 lectures by 18 May 2021. If you've already reached that milestone or expect to please send an email to Commander Gary Ross providing the name you'd like to have inscribed on the document and a snail mail mailing address we hope to distribute the certificate sometime in June. Looking ahead on Tuesday 6 April we will hear from Professor Dex Wilson who will speak on China hegemony and humiliation and today a family discussion group meeting will follow our formal lecture as the Admiral has indicated. Okay let's get on with the main event. During the presentation that follows, please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom and we'll get to as many as we can at the conclusion of the formal presentation. Civil military relations is a study of how the government, the armed forces, and the society interact with and view each other. We will consider this afternoon what ideal and healthy relationships looked like and how we can make them healthier. Dr. Jessica Blankshane joined the National Security Affairs Department in 2014 with a doctorate in political economy and government from Harvard University. She teaches theater decision theater security decision making and national security decision making policy analysis and co-teaches an elective on civil military relations. She is the co-author of decision making and American foreign policy translating theory into practice from Cambridge University Press. Her work has been published in numerous academic and policy journals including international studies perspectives, the Texas national security review, and Orbis. Dr. Cohn joined the national security affairs department in 2014 with a doctorate in political science from Duke University focusing on international security, political theory, and civil military relations. Here at the Naval War College she teaches courses on policy analysis, strategies, civil military relations, and short sessions on political economy for the advanced strategist program. As a council on foreign relations international affairs fellow she spent a year at the Pentagon working under the deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism. I am pleased to pass the digital baton on to Drs. Blankshane and Cohn. Over to you. Thank you so much, Professor Jackson. Welcome to everyone we really appreciate you being here. I'm going to share my screen really quickly. So all right, there we go. So we as Professor Jackson mentioned we are both civilian academics, political scientists to be precise, who teach in the national security affairs department. And we co-teach the elective on civil military relations that Professor Jackson mentioned and we came to this field for different reasons and from different directions. But I think both of us are interested, as Professor Jackson mentioned, in the idea of how a state and a society organize their use of violent or coercive force for collective goals. And so we have specifically concentrated on the official organization of such force through the military organization, even though there are sometimes unofficial uses of this kind of force. So what do we mean by civil military relations? Professor Jackson already kind of explained it. It's the question of how the collective, whatever that collective is, organizes and legitimizes its use of force. But put into a modern context, it's really the set of problems that arise when the group of people that does the fighting is distinct from both the group of people that does the governing and from the rest of the population. If your political unit is ruled by a warrior caste, a shogunate, for example, or a warlord, then there are no civil military relations because the military and the government are indistinguishable. By the same token, if you have a society where the entire population takes up arms or some massive portion of the population takes up arms when there's a threat and then puts those arms back down when the threat is over and goes back to whatever their lives were, farming or industry or whatever it was, then again, there is no distinction between the society and the military and you don't have civil military relations issues. But as a set of problems, and in most modern societies, there are these distinctions. So we concentrate on these distinctions. And of course, the two of us tend to concentrate on these distinctions within a democratic context. But that's not necessary. You have civil military relations issues in all kinds of political entities, not just democracies, they just they may look a little different. So we like to envision this relationship this way, the government, the people, the military, and we have put this diagram together to emphasize the fact that all three of these relationships are two way. Every member of this triangle has responsibilities and duties towards the others. None of these relationships go only one direction. So you will sometimes hear people talk about the issue of civilian control of the military, which is sort of how the military point on the triangle obeys the government. But that relationship is not simply one way to a certain extent, obedience as a status can be maintained only if the government is remaining legitimate and making good policy, for example. Although that brings us to another side of the triangle, which is where who gets to judge what counts as good policy, not the military, at least not in normative civil military relations, where we talk about what ought to happen and how things ought to be. Sometimes, of course, the military does judge the government and whether its policy is good. And then sometimes you end up with a coup and we would consider that bad. So we want to emphasize that all three of these relationships exist. All three of them are two way and all three of them are important. And we like to study all three of these relationships from two main perspectives. We call these descriptive and normative. And what we mean by that is descriptive study is looking at the way things are. How do things actually work? Not how we want them to work, but how do they actually work? Normative study refers to how things ought to work. Professor Jackson mentioned healthy relationships. Healthy relationships are an ideal. They're an idea that says this is how this ought to look. This is how these groups ought to relate to each other. That's normative, sort of idealistic or hopeful aspect. And we can study these things from two different time perspectives as well. Sometimes we want to know what is likely to happen in a certain place. Do we think that a coup is likely to happen? Do we think that a degrading of the relationship between the society and the military is likely to happen? That's when we are trying to predict. Sometimes we just want to explain what happened in the past. Why did something happen? That's obviously descriptive after the fact. Sometimes we want to understand whether something that happened was good or not. Is that something that we want to repeat? Is that something that was okay or acceptable to our political entity? That's the evaluate side of things. And then finally, sometimes we want to argue about what should happen going forward. We want to argue about whether we ought to take a certain set of political steps or social steps because we think that the likely outcome is a good thing or a bad thing. So Dr. Blankshane and I study civil military relations and the whole field studies it from these perspectives. And for fun, you can try to keep track of them throughout the presentation because we will talk about nearly all of these and you can keep a little bingo card if you want. One of the issues that we have with civil military relations is that it is such an enormous field. It covers all different kinds of states. It covers historical and contemporary periods. It covers all different types of questions having to do with history and psychology and economics and archaeology and operations and all kinds of things. We could not possibly cover it in one lecture. So what Dr. Blankshane and I have done is we've picked out three issues that have been fairly prominent in the news for the past year and that we thought you might want to think about and hear some analysis from us on. And so we are going to talk about, first, the politicization of the military and what that means and whether it's good or bad or a problem or not. Second, we will talk a little bit about the domestic use of the military. And third, we will talk a little bit about the all volunteer force, how it's doing, whether it is sustainable and so forth. And then we'll wrap it up and leave as much time as possible for your questions. Okay, so the first question, politicization of the military, what does this mean? We have heard a lot of discussion recently, especially with the dust up over Tucker Carlson's remarks about women in the military and then several high ranking military officials coming up in public and saying these are not our values, this is not how we think about things and this is not how we want our people to think about things. And there was a lot of pushback against that saying, hey, this is politicizing the military and that's bad. Well, is it and is it bad? So let's talk about this. The first thing you want to think about is, what do we mean by politics? I used to ask my undergraduates this question, I would say, you know, just do a word association. When I say politics, what do you think? And it'll go lies. And that was not helpful because it is true that politicians may lie, but that's not the main function of politics. The real difficulty with this concept is that politics can mean so many different things in different contexts. In the broader sense, however, anything that has to do either with the rules society sets up for how they're going to live together or on the process by which those rules are decided, that's political, that's politics. Politics is the process of how we make the rules for us as a society and the set of rules that we come up with. In this sense, militaries are inherently political as they must be chosen somehow. There has to be a process to determine who is and is not in the military and under what conditions. They must have organizational structure and rules which have to be decided upon by the society. And they must have roles and missions that are linked inextricably to the accomplishment of political goals. What is it a military is supposed to do and under what conditions are they supposed to do it? So some people you will frequently hear the argument that the military quote should not be a social experiment and is only there to fight and win or deter wars. But this is in itself a political argument. This is an argument about how some people would like or think the military ought to be normative. There we go. And implies certain expectations about who does and does not belong in certain roles in society. On the other hand, societies have historically had somewhat fraught and evolving relationships with their armed forces. And the question of who should be in the military and how they should be organized and trained and generally treated has differed both over time within societies and across societies throughout the world. So there is no sort of objective reality about what militaries are for and who should be in them. That is a political question. It's a question for the society to determine. So, but in that I've just described militaries as being quintessentially political. So is all of this militaries should be a political just wrong? No, we're not going to argue that. If you take a slightly narrower sense of politics, political is about the competition for power within the society and within the political structure. In most democratic countries, this is about winning elections. So often controlling party platforms or having access to funding, etc. In all countries, democratic or not, it is about the power and influence of various interest groups, their ability to influence policymakers to shape the rules in their interests. And here, militaries have inherent potential power, right? They have the means of coercive force. They could easily attain significant power, either as their own interest group or in support of other interest groups, they could make or break the prospects of political parties or individual politicians. And it's largely here that the idea that militaries ought to be a political is important, particularly in democratic societies. It would be very problematic if the military as an organization or even influential individuals or groups within it, like say the special forces community or special operations forces community, if they were backing certain candidates or political parties and thus distorting a system where people are supposed to be free to make choices. This is why it may be clearer to talk about the military needing to be non-partisan rather than apolitical, because what's really important is that the military not be actually or apparently associated with a particular political party or interest group, that it not be engaged in distorting the process that leads to the making of policy. This does not mean that military personnel can't have views on policies or can't belong to political parties or talk about the political parties they belong to, just that they should be careful not to connect those views to their military status, either visually or verbally. So why does this matter? I just talked a lot about what it means. Why does it matter? And we would argue that it matters for a couple of reasons. I kind of implied why it matters for the health of democratic institutions and governance, right? Because if you have the military backing a particular party or associated with one, you are sort of distorting the democratic representative system. But it also matters for a couple of other reasons. One is recruiting and retention of an effective force. If you have an organization that is largely perceived by society rightly or wrongly to be associated with a political, a particular political group, you might have a problem recruiting outside that group, right? Now in the U.S., we have a fairly generous set of benefits. We do a pretty good job of recruiting, but there is always a danger in any society where a military is seen to be sort of belonging to one group or another. So that's a concern. And then finally, the general attitude of the population. What do we mean by this? What you see here is from an article written by the Naval War College's own Professor David Burbach, and what he did is look at this phenomenon of public confidence in the military. And what you see here is public confidence in the military over time, starting from 1965 in these charts, broken down by party ID, that top thing with the red line, if you can see the color, that's Republicans. The bottom one with the blue is Democrats. And what you can see here is that both have an upward trend over time, right? Since, well, I mean, the red and blue lines start in 1973. So at the end of Vietnam, since the end of Vietnam, both of these have, in general, right, if you drew the average line through these, have gone up over time. But the Republican line has gone up more steeply. The Democratic line is, you know, a little bit flatter. And in recent years, especially since the beginning of the Iraq war, you see a fairly significant difference between how much confidence Republicans report having in the military and how much confidence Democrats report. And the importance of this is just to kind of start thinking about does politicization have effects? Now, do we know that this difference in confidence is caused by some particular aspect of politicization? No, we don't know exactly where it's coming from. We really don't. But we do see it and we worry about it. Because again, it seems to imply that there's a sort of sort of divergence in terms of how the public thinks about the military, which should, ideally, again, now we're back to normative, which should be an institution that everyone views as serving the public as being an institution that follows the political process and serves the public interest or the national interest. Just a little bit more on this issue of politicization and some examples of what we're talking about. You can see we have a few headlines here. If you remember at the Democratic Convention, I believe the representatives from American Virgin Islands or Guam, I can't remember. American Samoa. American Samoa. Thank you. Showed up in their Democratic National Convention video with two uniformed members of the Guard behind them. For no apparent reason, no one could really tell. What we expect here is that they were using them to show sort of patriotism and legitimacy. What we would all expect members of the military would symbolize. Patriotism, nobility, sacrifice, legitimacy, and maybe to a certain extent sort of reminder, hello, American Samoa is also America. Maybe that was what was going on. But it's still a politicization of the military. It's using military personnel to send a political message, which we would say is not appropriate. Then there's the headline about Tucker Carlson, which I already mentioned. Then we see down in the in the bottom right hand corner, you see a number of retired flag officers and general officers endorse Biden. Of course, in the 2016 election, you also had flag and general officers endorsing both candidates for presidency. This endorsement phenomenon, again, we think is coming from a space where politicians in general are looking for legitimacy, looking for somebody who can say, I'm an objective expert observer of policy and politics, and I think this is the right person. Hopefully, you can see how that might be an issue in terms of influencing people and who we think should be influencing people in terms of how they vote. Then we see in the bottom left, we see Trump says, troops love him, but attacks top brass, you want to do nothing, but fight wars. Trump issues pardons and war crimes cases. These were instances of, for example, interfering in the military justice system, interfering in the military personnel system in ways that seem to be fairly self-interested rather than in the national or public interest. And this tendency to hold political rallies before a backdrop of military personnel, which many politicians have done, again, is using military troops as props, more or less, is politicizing them not by anything that the military personnel themselves have done, but by something the civilian politicians are doing. And we would argue that that is also bad and the civilian politicians should not do these things. Okay, I know I'm really flying through this, but I want to leave time for questions at the end. So put them in the chat box. Dr. Blankshain is monitoring. We will try and get to that. You know, one of the other things that we saw, of course, this past year was the way that the military was actually and possibly involved in protests and protest response. And that brings us to this issue, this second issue that we wanted to get to for you, of domestic use of the military. This happens to be my personal bugbear. So I will do my best to restrain myself, but feel free to ask about it in the Q&A. So we saw a fair amount of domestic use of the military in the last couple of years. We anticipate that you may have a lot of questions. So let's get into this. The first big question is, for what? Why would we use the military domestically? What have we used the military domestically for? And in the case of the last year or two, it has mostly been three things, pandemic response, border control and protest response, as you see up on the screen. And I've kind of listed the types of activities that military personnel were involved in in these things. All three of these have in fact been performed primarily by members of the National Guard rather than the active component. But they have involved some active duty personnel and they have certainly involved the possibility of their use. I think everyone remembers in the summer when we had reports, when we know that the 82nd Airborne was standing by to go to Washington DC in case they needed to be deployed. And for many Americans, it has to be remembered, the distinction between the National Guard and the active component is not very clear. Many Americans are really not clear on sort of what the different components of the military are about, how they're different, and they certainly wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the difference visually. So from the perspective of how the public reacts to this, it's important to recognize that they can't always tell the difference between a National Guard deployment and an active component deployment. So we thought we would try to explain some of this. So I know that the first big question that everyone always has is, is this legal? And without getting into all of the sort of statutory legislative history, which is fascinating, you should definitely check it out. I just want to point out that in the case of the National Guard, yes, this is all absolutely legal. The National Guard, as many of you already know, but as our international partners may not, is the modern day, the modern day incarnation of the original state militia forces, the state organized militia forces. In other words, the groups of people in each state who volunteered to be on a list and to get together and drill occasionally and to be sort of competent and to be organized and competent in the use of their weapons and things like that, in case the state ever needed them for an emergency, any kind of emergency, right? And so these forces are responsible to the governor, first and foremost responsible to the governor. They can be activated to serve under federal auspices, but a lot of the service that we've seen in the last couple of years has actually still been under the state auspices, or under a thing called Title 32 activation where the federal government pays the most of it, but the chain of command still stays under the governor. And the National Guard, again, in theory, their primary mission is to serve the needs of the state. In actuality, over the last 20 years or so, they have been frequently deployed overseas as an operational reserve to the regular forces, which means that they have not spent, they have been worked a lot. They spend a lot more time now drilling and being on active service than they did in the 1980s and 90s. And they frequently do not spend a lot of time training or drilling for domestic operations the way that they used to. That doesn't mean they're not good at it, it just means they're stretched very thin. The National Guard is, they've been overworked, I would say. The most important thing here is that when they're under state control, they have an explicit law enforcement function. So they can arrest people if necessary. Now, governors may choose not to give them that authority. They don't automatically have that authority, but the governor can choose to give it to them or not. Regular forces, on the other hand, a lot of people think that this is where the law comes in. Not exactly. Regular forces, of course, are responsible to the president, but they can be used for domestic missions if the president deems it necessary. And I know you all know that there are laws that say the military can't do this and the military can't do that. All of those laws have an exception in them that say, unless it's otherwise authorized by statute or the Constitution. And most presidents would argue that they have authorization under multiple clauses of the Constitution to do all kinds of things with the military domestically. The Supreme Court has basically never limited this ability with one exception and it wasn't a very serious exception. And so in effect, if the president chooses to use these forces, there is very little to stop him. You know, the Supreme Court might say that's gone too far, but that would be post hoc, would be after the thing had happened. And state officials who object to the use of federal forces in their states, if you remember Portland this past summer, state and local officials did not want federal forces there. But there was nothing they could do that they did not have remedy for that. But there are also explicit things in statute that the president can use active duty forces for and those include things like protecting federal property and forcing federal law, not state law necessarily, but federal law, suppressing insurrection. There's a whole law for that, aid to civil authorities for disaster or other issues. And finally, the one that's directly in the Constitution is guaranteeing a Republican form of government to the states. In other words, if there were an insurrection within one of the states that didn't threaten necessarily the federal government, the federal government could still decide to go in and put down that insurrection in the interests of supporting the state's right to a Republican form of government. So I'm not going to keep going on this, because I will go on all day, but I just want to make it clear that even to the extent that there are limitations and there are limitations on what the active duty forces can do domestically, they can't just do anything. But to the extent that there are limitations, they're not terribly robust. The US president has an awful lot of power. And it's within Congress's power to constrain him, but it's very difficult for Congress to get itself together enough to agree on how to constrain him. And so to a large extent, you end up with a fairly unconstrained executive. All right, let's see. So then the next question is, does this count as politicization, this domestic use of the forces for response to protests, for border control, border enforcement, construction at the border, et cetera? And of course, as any good academic would respond, the answer is it depends. It depends on whether these uses are, in fact, in the public interest in some good faith sense, or if they are used for other things. For example, disaster response might seem like an apolitical thing. But if a president used the military for disaster response in some states, but not others, based on whether the president likes the governor or not, or based on whether the president thinks that those people will vote for him or not, that would be a politicized use of the military, right? Border control might seem like a sort of apolitical use of the military. It's an enforcement of federal law in many cases. However, if it's used to, for example, evade Congress's checks and balances by moving money that Congress did not choose to move, that could be considered a politicized use of the military. And I would point out that in neither of these cases is there anything the military can do about this, right? These are not illegal orders. And so we are not saying that the military is necessary. So there are things that military personnel can do to politicize themselves or not. And there are things that civilian politicians can do to politicize the military or not. Dr. Blankshane and I, of course, would argue that both of those things are bad. But we also recognize that it's easier to discipline and educate members of the military than it is to discipline and educate members of the civilian political class. So we think that maybe just having more people be aware of the issue will help in some ways. Because that goes back to our third corner of the triangle, which is the public. The public are the ones supposed to be holding the civilian politicians accountable for this kind of behavior, pointing it out, noticing it, saying that it's bad and wrong, and holding them to account when they do these things. Then there is the question, is this a good idea? So I made the case a couple of slides ago that it's legal in many cases. And it may sometimes be in the public interest. But is it a good idea? Should we do this a lot? And I think both Dr. Blankshane and I would argue no. There are a lot of reasons why this is actually not the domestic use of the military is not a good idea in many cases. For one thing, most personnel are not trained or equipped for this, especially for things like crowd control, which puts both the military personnel and the civilians at risk. If the military personnel are not trained or equipped, they will be less confident. They will be less certain of how they're supposed to respond or behave. They may have to improvise. And they will have the likelihood that they may make mistakes or be in difficult situations they don't know how to respond to goes up. Obviously protests and law enforcement issues are often politicized and that just puts military personnel in a very difficult position both at the time and in terms of how the public sees them after. And it may do something that we haven't talked about much, but it may enhance the public's view of the military as the only competent agency. And I think many of the members of the military in this audience are sort of aware of this problem. We might think of it as mission creep, but if you don't think that Health and Human Services or the CDC are capable of rolling out the vaccine, we'll just make the military do it. Or if you think that FEMA is not capable of taking care of a community after a hurricane, have the military do it. This kind of thing Dr. Blankshain and I would argue is really not a good idea. Not only is the military not trained and equipped and available to do all of these things, but you want the public to understand that other agencies of government are also competent and able to do their jobs. And you should want the ones who are competent at vaccine rollouts to do the vaccine rollout and not the military. It's just our perspective on this one, but we do think about it a lot. And then finally, we worry about this being a symptom of just a fragile political system in general, that if you are at the point where you need the military to intervene domestically, you're probably at a point where the government has lost a lot of legitimacy. And that's usually not a good thing. Okay. And then last, but not least, and I'm just going to zip through these so that we can get to questions, is this issue of the all volunteer force. So especially since the end of Vietnam and the end of the draft, a number of people, a number of commentators have been concerned that the military has become increasingly isolated, that it's a warrior cast that nobody knows anyone in the military anymore, that because no one knows anyone in the military, that means that we engage in all of this foreign policy, adventurism like forever wars, etc, etc. So we as academics, of course, wanted to check and see how many of these things were actually true. And there are a few things that we just want to emphasize here. Number one, the question of representativeness of the military is the military less and less like American society. The answer to that is, no, not really. It is certainly not a purely representative organization. As you can see, there are there are ways in which the military is very different from the rest of society. But it is relatively representative in terms of race and ethnicity and socioeconomic status, which are two of the things that people worry about the most. And we want to emphasize that in fact, the current all volunteer force is the most representative military the United States has ever had, including during a peacetime draft and including during World War Two. So it's important to understand sort of, what are we comparing this to? Right? Again, when we think about this normative question, what do we want? What is healthy? It may not be perfect, but it's better now than it has been at other times. We have a couple of, that is fuzzy. This basically just shows that the military is significantly more male than regular society. It also shows that the military is actually significantly more highly educated than the average American. The average American has a high school degree, but it's usually at around a 10 percentage point lower rate than the military does. And only about a third of American adults have a bachelor's degree of some kind. Whereas in, of course, the office decor, it's a hundred percent at this, practically a hundred percent. We're going to skip that one. Is it isolated? This is a difficult question to answer. But if you think about it in terms of physical isolation, again, the question is compared to what? Compared to World War Two? Yes, kind of isolated. Compared to the 19th century? No. You know, 19th century, all of the army bases were way out in the middle of, you know, very rural frontier areas, hours and hours and hours away from any center of urban life or anything like that. So again, we need to sort of decide what it is we think is healthy and right before we start making judgments about whether things are bad now. Again, why are these so fuzzy? Here, this one's not fuzzy. This one is a really helpful thing to think about. A lot of you have probably heard the statistic that, you know, it's less than 1% who serve. True. However, that's less than 1% at any given time. Something like 20 something percent of the male population of the United States has veteran status, has some military background. And what this graph shows you, if you look over on the left, that's the percentage of the population that was in the military at any given time. And what you can see is the only time, I mean, even the Civil War, 3%, 3% of the population fought in the military in the Civil War, 3% a little less in World War One. World War Two, enormous outlier. And then what you see after World War Two is the Cold War, when we simply did not demobilize back down to the way that we had done things up until that point, we kept a large standing peacetime army for the first time ever. And what's new these days is not that we have a tiny force like we never had before, but that we are fighting wars without spiking the force. We're fighting wars just with the force that we have, instead of doing what we did in the past, which is have a very, very small core standing force and spike it whenever we had a war. Let's see. Okay. I don't want to go through this because we want to leave some time for questions, but we do just want to point out one of the things that people talk about when they talk about the isolation of the force, when they talk about worrying that there is no connection between the all-volunteer force and society that itself selected, right? A lot of people then argue that maybe conscription is the answer. And you see up here some of the reasons that you hear for conscription, the idea that we need to somehow force society to pay attention to foreign policy. We need to ensure that citizenship is clearly connected to the obligation of defense. More recently, you'll hear people making the argument that we won't be able to fight a great power war with China with only volunteers. We'll have to have conscription for that, things like that. So we actually, Dr. Blanchain and I have done some research on one of these issues, which is the one that says that if only society were more connected to the military, if only there were conscription, if only there were a possibility that people would be at risk themselves if the U.S. went to war, then we would have a more restrained foreign policy. And unfortunately, Dr. Blanchain and I have found that there is no empirical basis for this idea. I know it sounds logical. It really does sound logical. It makes a lot of sense. But if you actually check the causal chain that would have to happen between conscripting people and the president deciding not to go to war, it becomes way more complicated. And it turns out that Americans, in fact, number one, having a member, a family member in the military doesn't seem to affect their views about whether a war was worth fighting or not. So if you look at the chart on your right hand, you'll see that that top question was the Iraq war worth fighting? 57% and 58% say that it wasn't. 57% of the families that had an immediate family member who has served in the military said nope, not worth fighting. And this was statistically identical to the number of families who didn't have a family member who would have served in the military who said it wasn't worth it. In other words, having a family member in the military made no difference here at all. Same thing with Afghanistan war worth not worth fighting, field wars make little difference in my life. These are statistically indistinguishable. It makes no difference. You may say this isn't the only way to find this out. You're absolutely right. But that's why Dr. Blankstein and I did our own research on it. We will go through these if you ask us about it. But our finding was essentially that there was no connection, none, between a person's expectation of actually experiencing a cost related to a military operation and whether they supported the military operation or not. In other words, it simply didn't make a difference in terms of whether people said yes, we support this operation or no, we don't, whether they thought that they would be personally required to serve in it or not. Granted, survey experiment hypothetical, maybe would be different in real life. But this is consistent with a lot of other research that's happening right now that is basically showing that people make more complicated cost-benefit analyses than those. They look at things and they say, would it be worth it to fight in this thing? Is this a legitimate operation? Should I support this for other reasons? And if so, maybe I'd be willing to fight in it. I will stop there to give us time to go to questions. I'm sorry that I rushed through this like crazy, but there was so much to cover. Dr. Blankstein, do we have questions that we want to get to? We do. And thank you to Dr. Kahn for taking that on while I am holding a two-month-old who could go off at any moment. But in terms of questions, we had, let's see, we had one come in about the idea of politicization and endorsements and well, a couple of different questions. One asking sort of, do we think that retired officers should make these endorsements? And another one about, well, what about the retired officers who have themselves run for office? So I'll take this one. I think among civil military scholars, the real source of concern here is what Lindsey alluded to as the sense of trying to have it both ways of doing an explicitly partisan act, endorsing a candidate in a partisan election, but doing it on the grounds that that endorsement has weight because of one's sort of above politics expert military status. That's the source of concern is that it tries to have it both ways and blur those things. So a number of scholars would say that's where running for office is different because by running for office, you're sort of declaring yourself explicitly to be a partisan actor and stepping into that role in a way that's a little bit different than sort of trying to stay a little bit arms length from politics by just doing an endorsement. Anything to add there, Lindsey? Yeah, I would add, I completely agree. And I think Dr. Blanchion has really hit the nail on the head, but I would add that we have seen in the last few years an attempt by many veterans running for office to sort of claim that their veteran status makes them a different kind of politician, right? There's a group, I think with Anna, who run, who ask anyone joining them to sign a pledge that says that they will be more bipartisan as elected politicians than those normal civilians who just can't stay out of party politics. And so we do see almost a bleeding over of this. I'm better than that. I'm apolitical coming from the veteran side. But yeah, classically, we think that veterans running for office is a sort of qualitatively different thing than as Dr. Blanchion described it, veterans standing back and saying, I'm speaking from my position of authority as an expert, as someone who doesn't get into politics. And I'm saying that objectively, this person is the best, right? Which is very different from saying, I'm a partisan political actor, and I endorse this person because I think they will do what's best for the party platform, for example. Okay, another question about basically, is it possible to have a nonpartisan Department of Defense? This touches on a few of my favorite things, which are both civil military relations and bureaucratic politics. And so here, I think it's important to note that that some of the things that Lindsay talked about in terms of ideas of civilian control of the military or how we think of the military as a part of government, some of those are not unique to the military. They're actually common to how we think about large parts of the government, the sort of expert part of government that doesn't change over with political administrations, right? Your career civil servants for the most part. And so I think that's an important part of this question of can we have a nonpartisan Department of Defense, that in some ways, we're not supposed to have a nonpartisan Department of Defense, if you're looking at the very senior leadership, those are political appointees. This came out a lot in some of the discussions around the new Biden administration nominations of who was going to be put in these positions. A number of people argued that Secretary Austin would make a good secretary because he would be a political and the secretary would be a political. I would argue that the Secretary of Defense should not be a political really in any meaningful sense. They are a representative of the administration in a way that members of the active duty military and members of the career civil service are not. So I think that's where it's helpful to think of that distinction of we would like to think that we can have a nonpartisan Department of Defense at the level of members of the military and career civil servants. But that's a different thing than looking at the political appointee department leadership, which I don't think we would expect to be necessarily nonpartisan or apolitical. They're representing the administration's agenda. Anything to add there, Lindsey? Nope. Let's see. So we didn't talk much about the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. We have a question about the National Guard responsiveness there. So I'm going to broaden this out a little bit. Lindsey, could you talk a little bit about sort of the guard's role in that response and whether there would have been maybe a significant difference between the civil military optics of the guard versus active duty being involved in that situation? Yeah, sure. There absolutely would have been a different difference in optics between the National Guard and the active component there. I think one of the important things to understand here is that there were a number of things going on. One of them is that in order to get guard support, you have to request it. And so there was the issue of how much guard support was requested before the events of the 6th. In other words, how much did the people responsible for anticipating events, how much did they anticipate? And the answer to that seems to have been not much. Though there were very, very few, you know, Mayor Bowser did request a small guard presence, but she and the Pentagon, the Secretary of the Army, who is responsible, he has the authority over D.C. Guard issues, agreed that it would not be good optics, especially after what happened in D.C. earlier in the summer, to have a big uniformed presence on the streets. And so she and the Secretary of the Army agreed that the guard presence would be mostly away from where protests and demonstrations were expected in order to free up metropolitan police to do the policing stuff. It seems that the sergeants at arms of the Senate and House do not seem to have requested any National Guard support. There are some, there are contested claims going on there, but in general it seems that they did not request any National Guard support, which means that the National Guard wasn't already there or necessarily on standby. Then when things actually went crazy, when when things actually started to happen, you did have various people calling the Secretary of the Army, calling the Secretary of Defense saying we need the National Guard, but chains were not clear. And it does seem that there were discussions within the Pentagon again about optics and about whether this was a good idea and about whether it was really necessary. There seemed to have been some, there seems to have been a fair amount of miscommunication, but also sort of skepticism within the Pentagon that this was really, really necessary and that it wouldn't look good. Now eventually, you know, a number of people have argued that while the Guard can't respond on a dime, that's true and you know it would have taken the Maryland Guard and the Virginia Guard some time to get there, but the D.C. Guard was able to respond very quickly once they were actually called up, right? Once the Secretary of the Army said yes, we'll do this, the D.C. Guard responded very quickly. So I think that what you had there was mainly a failure to plan and anticipate and partly a real concern, whether justified or not I'm not going to get into, but a real concern within the Pentagon about whether this would damage the Pentagon's reputation the way that the events of the summer had done or at least the way that they felt that the events of the summer had done. It seems that Lafayette Square left a very lasting impression on the people inside the Pentagon and many of them were not eager to have that happen again. And I think particularly because, not because they thought that invading the Capitol was okay, but I think particularly because this started out at a rally supporting the President of the United States and they felt that it would be that it might be problematic for there to be a big presence there. So I think a lot of this was just a huge failure to prepare and anticipate what was likely to happen, but there also seems to have been a real concern with how this would be perceived and how it would affect sort of the reputation of the military. Professor Jackson, can we take one more quick question? Absolutely. All right, excellent. So we have a question here, particularly in the contact of great power competition. The question is, is there a disconnect between express support for the military and express support for the DOD budget? So I, off the top of my head, I don't know the sort of figures on support for the budget off the top of my head. I will say that it is a broader phenomenon of public opinion that people like to support things until you are in the context of a trade-off made explicit and then it gets a lot harder, right? Even people who don't necessarily in general support sort of big government or government spending frequently are in support of a lot of specific programs because asked if you want this program, sure, sounds good. And so I think a lot of this kind of depends on how you frame the question of whether you are making some of the trade-offs of this amount of military spending means you're either not spending on these domestic things or you're increasing taxes or you're increasing debt. I think a lot of the response would depend on how you frame the question. Lindsay? Yeah, and I would also, I would just add to that that most of the American public doesn't really understand the concepts of the trade-offs that happen within the defense budget, right? The trade-offs among say modernization, readiness, manpower, etc. And so as just said, right, most people kind of hesitate when they're faced with trade-offs in sort of the whole federal budget, but they really don't have any idea what they're talking about with respect to what you spend things on within the defense budget either. And so I think that what you've got, that being said, it's always easier to, as a politician, it's always easier to support spending on defense than spending on anything else, period. It's just always easier to do that. Even in Democratic districts where you would expect people to be more about infrastructure or education or things like that, it is generally easier for a politician to advocate spending on defense issues than on anything else. And so in the context of great power competition, I think that it's really going to depend on how the political leadership frames it. If you have a Trump administration framing it as we have a significant threat, people worry about threats. And if you tell them they're under threat, they are usually willing to spend money to get out of it. But if you have a Biden administration saying things like, well, it's just a challenge, it's a strategic challenge, but we can work together on certain things, that's almost certainly likely to make the budget trade-off that Dr. Glankshein mentioned much more controversial because people will say, hey, why should we be spending this on defense if it's not an existential threat? Yeah, and just one last point. As Lindsay said, talking about these trade-offs, one of the reasons that defense spending is frequently so easy to support is because it can be framed as not a trade-off. We're spending on defense and its job creation too because we're spending on building things in the United States. So that also is an important dynamic here. With that, I think we have actually addressed most of the main things I saw brought up in the chat. So thank you all so much for attending and listening today. Thank you very much, doctors. A tremendous presentation. And Jessica, we may want to bring you back to talk about mother-son relationships because your baby was so good today. So very nicely done. Admiralty, a comment you'd like to make before we break for the family discussion group meeting. Well, I'd just like to say how much I enjoyed that dialogue that you had, the questions that you responded to at the end. But the logic within your presentation was just very compelling. And thank you for being very specific about the language and offering us definitions to kind of diffuse some of the confusion and possibly even the emotional charge that people may have when having conversations on this topic. Being able to have a dialogue with another on something which can become very challenging if the terminology is not understood the same way or if emotions start to rise. And so thank you for presenting it in such a way. I really think that that was very effective. Thank you very much, Admiral.